As an adult, I have come to appreciate the circumstances that made my own adoption necessary. I know now that the greatest gift and sacrifice my mother ever made was the day she signed the papers and "gave me up" for adoption. But what about a child's perspective?

Here are some ideas and examples from my dissolved and reconstituted same-sex-parents-headed family that can help parents in different households avoid feeling like one is "primary" and the other is, well, "other."

The time is now to extend presumptive parenthood to both members of a lesbian relationship when it can be shown that the child was planned, conceived and welcomed into an intact (even if struggling) relationship.

My romantic assumption was that as women and as lesbians, my ex-partner and I could navigate a breakup more cleanly than a heterosexual couple could, that we could split the kids equally and fairly. So how did I find myself in the role of the secondary, or "other," mother?

Since fighting to be included in the heteronormative model of marriage and then being steamrolled by the heteronormative model of divorce, I've been fighting these systems from the perspective of the "other" mother.

I asked Walter to prom a bit late. None of the straight boys in my very tiny high school had come through, so I faced the music and asked my gay friend. "I have to think this over" was his underwhelmed response.

This question is difficult, because it is both personal and political. This feels to me like the sophisticated version of the needling question "but which one is your real mom?" except of course this question, about who gets to be called "Mommy," is more legitimate.

I cannot tell you how many times in any given week I end up stuck between a grownup concept and a kid who wants an explanation that he can understand. How do you explain the difference between family love and romantic love to a kindergartener?

The night Ellen came out, I felt like my family got an invitation to the party. It hadn't occurred to me that we'd been excluded thus far, but now I saw it. The price of inclusion was noticing that all along we hadn't been included.

My mother may continue to cringe at the word "queer," but I invite you to consider the idea that queerness can be a pretty good thing. In the broad sense of the word, every person who has ever gone against social norms and values in order to improve them is queer.

While matters of gender and biology may be relevant to making a child, it is parenting that makes a parent. The ability and the desire to love a child unconditionally has nothing to do with one's gender.

More than one new mother will feel vindicated by her admission to People that she hadn't been to the gym for two weeks, and she'd started drinking coffee again after two years of abstaining from caffeine. And that's not all...

Little did Queen Margaret of Scotland know in 1288, when she anointed every fourth year as a leap year to encourage women to be more assertive in the dating game, that 2012 would see gay women, more than any other group, successfully upturning long-held female traditions.

Every time I see a photo of some pregnant woman, hands resting gently on her swollen middle, get the urge to wrestle her to the ground and demand why she is perpetuating the lie that pregnancy is this stress-free.